'Papers on murdered private eye shredded by the Met' [Wales on Sunday (Wales)]

The investigator was found slumped beside his BMW with an axe in his skull outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, South London, on March 10, 1987.

Now it has emerged in Mark Ellison QC's review that Detective Sergeant John Davidson - named as suspected of having links to the gangster father of one of the thugs convicted of Stephen Lawrence's racist murder - was connected to the investigation of the 37- yearold PI.

"It's a nasty mess once you start looking into it," Alastair Morgan said. He said a corrupt "firm within a firm" was working at the Met and that cover-up was the force's "default position."
Mr Ellison set out allegations that Davidson was in the pay of Clifford Norris, drug-smuggling father of David Norris, convicted of Stephen's murder in 2012.

They were published in his review of corruption and undercover policing in the Stephen Lawrence murder case this week.

The claims against the retired officer, who has denied wrongdoing, were made by former colleague Neil Putnam, a crooked cop- turned-supergrass.

"What I also find disturbing is that the files from Operation Othona - an operation carried out by the Ghost Squad between 1994 and 1997 examining corruption in the Met - Mark Ellison's report reveals these files were shredded, and I believe that took place in 2003 when John Stevens was commissioner and Andy Hayman was head of professional standards at the Met," said Mr Morgan.

The Ghost Squad was a secret group of anti-corruption officers at Scotland Yard.

"It's inconceivable that there was no evidence of my brother's case in those files," Alastair said.

"The fact that those files have been shredded is outrageous."
The Met was unable to find Operation Othona intelligence from 1998, except for some discovered on a hard drive in a cardboard box, for the Ellison review, left in the IT department of its Directorate of Professional Standards.

"We have very recently been informed that in 2003 there was mass shredding of the surviving hard copy reports generated by Operation Othona," Ellison wrote.

"It has accordingly not been possible for us to check exactly what intelligence was held by the Metropolitan Police Service at the time of the public inquiry so as to check exactly what should have been revealed to it."
Alastair never met DS Davidson. "Everything that is coming out at the moment is new to me and it is disturbing," the 65-year-old said.

"This is going to run, it's not going to stop here."
Former Met former assistant commissioner John Yates told Ellison that Davidson had been the focus of internal investigations "for years."
An inquiry into the case is ongoing.